In our past debates about SSM, pointing out the obvious, logical implications of arguments for re-defining marriage to include same-sex couples was variously dismissed as “false equivalencies”,“vacuous”,“far-fetched”, and as possibilities that exist only in the “slippery slope” imaginations of those who object to SSM (to wit, “I understand that no defender of SSM would have raised the idea if it had not been first made an attack point by opponents of SSM”).

It turns out, however, that a document titled Beyond Same-Sex Marriage was produced way back in the dark ages of 2006 before it was politically expedient to support SSM, in which all of the fanciful, vacuous, far-fetched, slippery slope implications of SSM we fully laid out by the burgeoning SSM movement…as long term goals. A taste:

We, the undersigned – lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) and allied activists, scholars, educators, writers, artists, lawyers, journalists, and community organizers – seek to offer friends and colleagues everywhere a new vision for securing governmental and private institutional recognition of diverse kinds of partnerships, households, kinship relationships and families. In so doing, we hope to move beyond the narrow confines of marriage politics as they exist in the United States today.

…The struggle for same-sex marriage rights is only one part of a larger effort to strengthen the security and stability of diverse households and families. LGBT communities have ample reason to recognize that families and relationships know no borders and will never slot narrowly into a single existing template.

…Marriage is not the only worthy form of family or relationship, and it should not be legally and economically privileged above all others. While we honor those for whom marriage is the most meaningful personal ­– for some, also a deeply spiritual – choice, we believe that many other kinds of kinship relationship, households, and families must also be accorded recognition.

Among these relationships that should be granted the legal and cultural equivalence of marriage are:

Committed, loving households in which there is more than one conjugal partner

…and:

Close friends and siblings who live together in long-term, committed, non-conjugal relationships, serving as each other’s primary support and caregivers

…and:

Queer couples who decide to jointly create and raise a child with another queer person or couple, in two households

Perhaps what we who oppose court imposed SSM were saying all those many months ago was not quite so vacuous and far-fetched, after all.

BTW, if you want to peruse the hundreds of signatories to this document, representing ostensibly respectable institutions like Harvard, Georgetown, Columbia, University of Texas Austin, NYU, you can find them here.